Ticket scalping and UK law, as of 2026

Reselling tickets for profit is — still — mostly legal in the UK, with narrow exceptions and a regulatory tide moving against it. Here's the actual legal position in 2026, minus the folklore.

What's illegal today

• Buying with bots to beat purchase limits (Digital Economy Act 2017 — criminal).
• Resale of football tickets without authorisation (s.166 CJPOA 1994 — a public-order-era rule specific to football).
• Fraudulent listings — speculative selling of tickets you don't hold, and failing resale-disclosure duties (CRA 2015: seat, face value, restrictions must be disclosed).
• Non-transparent pricing on resale sites under the DMCC Act's total-price rules.

What's changing

The government consulted through 2025 on capping resale prices — the leading option being a cap in the region of face value plus a small uplift, alongside platform-liability duties for illegal listings. DC's 2026 10% cap across the Atlantic gave UK campaigners a working example. As of mid-2026, legislation is expected rather than in force: watch this space, but don't claim 'resale caps are law' yet — they aren't.

What organisers can legally do now

1. Make tickets named and/or app-locked — no law requires transferability; DICE built a brand on it.
2. Offer an official face-value resale/waiting-list route, which removes the tout's liquidity.
3. Set T&Cs voiding tickets resold above face — enforceable as contract at the door, if you can identify them.
4. Cap per-customer purchases and enforce with payment/device fingerprinting.

The fee connection

Touting thrives on artificial scarcity plus opaque totals. Transparent pricing, honest capacity releases and official transfer routes shrink the arbitrage — the same instincts that make fee-transparent platforms good citizens make them poor tout habitats.